Jiang's heirs will bring about Cold War foe's vision

scmp ^ | January 7, 2002 | FRANK CHING

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Policy hawk John Foster Dulles was never China's favourite American official. It was he who, as former president Dwight Eisenhower's secretary of state, refused to shake hands with then-premier Zhou Enlai at a meeting in 1954.

Dulles considered communism, and communists, evil. But, regardless of one's views of Dulles as a Cold War warrior, his policy has special relevance for China as it prepares for a transition from a third to a fourth generation of party leaders.

Dulles enunciated the policy of "peaceful evolution" rather than war as the means for freeing the "enslaved people" in the Soviet Union, China and other communist countries. He predicted that, by the third or fourth generation, party leaders would lose their communist zeal and gradually change colour, allowing their people to become free. And he wanted the US to do whatever it could to facilitate this process.

He certainly made an impact on Mao Zedong. The party chairman, fearful that the US was out to subvert China with "sugar-coated bullets", launched repeated purges of his top associates, whom he feared would betray the communist cause by turning revisionist.

Mao's fears appeared to be confirmed in 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev, who had succeeded Josef Stalin as Soviet leader, denounced his predecessor. Soon, Mao concluded that Khrushchev had betrayed Marxism and had turned into a revisionist. He wanted to make sure that would not happen in China.

During the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Mao's fanatical Red Guards dubbed the head of state Liu Shaoqi "China's Khrushchev", while Deng Xiaoping was labelled the "No 2 party leader taking the capitalist road". Both men, along with many others, were purged.

Although Deng survived to become China's paramount leader after Mao's death, he, too, was worried about peaceful evolution, especially after the crushing of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in June 1989. Like Mao in his later years, Deng, too, picked and then discarded a series of successors. He criticised both Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang for having failed to oppose bourgeois liberalisation.

"The Western countries are staging a third world war without gun smoke," he warned in November 1989. "They want to bring about the peaceful evolution of socialist countries towards capitalism."

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Deng's fear of peaceful evolution became even more marked. While he continued to press forward with economic reforms, he was insistent that the Communist Party must maintain its monopoly on political power.

The struggle against bourgeois liberalisation, he said in 1992, must continue for 20 years or longer. "The imperialists are pushing for peaceful evolution towards capitalism in China, placing their hopes on the generations that will come after us," Deng said.

"Comrade Jiang Zemin and his peers can be regarded as the third generation, and there will be a fourth and a fifth. So long as we of the older generation are still alive, no change is possible. But after we are dead and gone, who will ensure that there is no peaceful evolution?"

Deng was speaking in 1992, when he was 88. Afterwards, he became increasingly frail and inactive. He died in 1997, apparently satisfied with the performance of Jiang Zemin as the core of the third generation of leaders.

But Mao himself considered Deng a revisionist of the first order. One of the first things Deng did after gaining power was to give up the idea of class struggle, something that Mao considered indispensable.

No doubt there are still some in the party today who consider that Deng had paved the way for peaceful evolution in China with his economic reforms.

As long as Deng was alive, Mr Jiang refrained from ideological innovation. But his recent proposal for admitting capitalists into the Communist Party was openly opposed by conservatives who, no doubt, considered this to be travelling down the capitalist road.

Other party members, reluctant to voice opposition in public, privately deplore allowing capitalistic exploiters of workers to join a party meant to work for the interests of workers. Soon, Mr Jiang is expected to step down to make way for a fourth generation.

Those leaders, when facing new problems, will need to make adjustments not just to policies but to basic ideological doctrines as well. Since these decisions will be made by Chinese for the welfare of China, there is no reason to oppose them on the grounds of peaceful evolution.

As long as the decisions lie in China's own hands, there is no need for Mao to turn over in his mausoleum. But John Foster Dulles, who died in 1959, may well be resting in peace with a smile on his face, content that what he had predicted in the 1950s is coming to pass almost half a century later.

Frank Ching (frankching1@aol.com) is a Hong Kong-based journalist and commentator.

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